The Spiritual World

Collection Exhibition 2014

Closed Monday(if Monday is a national holiday or a substitute holiday, it is the next day)

Admission：Adults ￥500／College Students ￥400／High School and Junior High School Students, Over 65 ￥250

The Spiritual World is our theme for the 2014 edition of the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography's annual collection exhibition. Each collection exhibition is an occasion for selecting photographs and other material from the museum's permanent collection of some 30,000 items. The Spiritual World presents works that span from the early 19th century to the present day and that evoke the subject of the exhibition title from diverse perspectives.

Characterizing the Japanese spirituality of old was the assumed existence of innumerable invisible deities that inhabited natural features. People were respectful of those deities and possessed a worldview in which life and death were complementary facets of a larger cycle of existence. Much of our nation's traditional spirituality succumbed to the rationality of modernization, but the time has surely come to re-examine the faith of our forebears. We might well discover in that faith valuable hints for coping with the increasingly complex issues of our day.

The Spiritual World brings together works from the museum collection that illuminate Japanese religion and folk beliefs. Simultaneously, these works reveal fascinating aspects of the spiritual orientation and aesthetic vision that have steered the artists. We hope that this exhibition will occasion for the visitors a renewed receptivity to invisible and transcendent possibilities.